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Comment by ronnier | Hacker News Reader

I really think we have too many people working at most companies. It pushes people to the extremes and edges just to have something to work on. Managers need more people under them to get promotions. And managers want to manage managers to keep moving up. They fill teams of people on products that could really be ran by a fraction of the engineers. But that’s not where we are, we are on large teams working on small areas of the product inventing areas to build in and often ruining the product as a result.

We also get slower with so many people. The coordination overhead is killer and losing context as the product is sliced up into small parts that move on without you

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> we have too many people working at most companies.

I half-disagree with this. My take is significantly more top-down: senior management has a deficient concept of how product development works. They believe Manpower is to be spent to achieve revenue, either by directly selling the result as a product (e.g. airplanes selling wifi to passengers) or by it being a differentiating feature for the sales department. This causes every allocation decision (like hiring) to fundamentally be biased around getting a tangible return: by creating new projects, new features, and new buggy microservices.

Further, since management only has two knobs (manpower and timeline) to play with, they like to move them to feel like they're optimizing the project. It's always the same fallacies, too: "we hired more people so we can create explosive growth", "we created ambitious timelines, now we're striving to fill them" etc.

I don't have a solution for this, except to note that it can be mitigated by managing up. Construct your own narrative, and take advantage of the fact that the non-technical people above you govern almost entirely by gut feeling.

Yeah I dunno, I hear this a lot, but there has universally been way more work to do than people to do it at every company I've worked for. But that doesn't mean the right things are being prioritized.

There is a lot of work, but a lot of that work is generated by people doing the wrong thing too often.

If we had a smaller and more competent team, the initial build might have been marginally slower, but we wouldn’t have to spend a permanent 50% to just keeping down the technical debt.

You’re working from a cost-efficiency / cost optimization perspective. That’s a great perspective in some contexts, for example, mature late-stage products, fully saturated markets, etc.

Is cost efficiency an effective perspective for innovation or revenue growth? Mostly, no. As long as your risk-of-ruin is low, then you want to fail. Sometimes people misinterpret this as “doing the wrong thing”. But it takes doing a lot of wrong things to do the right thing.

The difference between right and wrong, if there ever was such a simple dichotomy, is so marginal and only understood in hindsight.

You ask the executive if he wants to get to his goal with a team of 200 after lighting on fire 20M, or with a team of 20 after paying 2M.

Ultimately you end up in the same spot, but one choice is fairly suboptimal there.

The whole point of the comment you replied to is that, if the "goal" is something innovative rather than just sustaining, then no, you don't end up in the same spot in those two scenarios.

But this is why some executives are better for some kinds of businesses and others are better for other kinds. Some executives don't understand your parent comment's point (or just don't find it comfortable), and will be very allergic to the "waste" necessary to experiment and iterate on poorly understood projects. Other executives will be uncomfortable just constantly figuring out how to optimize costs without damaging revenues.

A very tricky part of the lifecycle of many companies that get gigantic is to figure out when to flip this and start switching out the executive team to focus on a different model.

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